RAID

RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard disk drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical data is kept on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be held on quick SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use high-speed SSD drives that will boost the speed of your sites noticeably. The hard drives function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use multiple drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, your information will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this type of configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.